Academic Quotes

Postmodern theatre seems unwilling to listen to talk about textual or theatrical heritage, which it treats as no more than memory in the technical sense of that word, as an immediately available and reusable memory bank.

But what if your fire is not burning well or, worse, has gone out? Without inner fire, you have no light, no heat, no desire... there's only one way out - and that's through the dark woods. You must change your life.

When it comes to acid rain or oil spills or depleted fisheries or tainted groundwater or fluorocarbon propellants or radiation leaks or sexually transmitted diseases, national frontiers are simple irrelevant. Toxins don't stop for customs inspections and microbes don't carry passports. North America became a water and free-trade zone long before NAFTA loosened up the market in goods.

Benjamin Barber

If we are to have such a discipline we must have standards, and to get our standards under existing conditions we must have criticism.

We see in Nature what we have been taught to look for, we feel what we have been prepared to feel.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson

Cultural elites in countries that dominate peoples have adapted subject people's religion for their own purposes.

Richard A. Horsley

Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.

Commercials are not the only junk food in the speech market - indeed, when compared to shallow news reporting, vacuous television shows, or political doublespeak, commercials are not even the most harmful to mental health.

Rodney A. Smolla

Human sexuality is... a long way from the depositing of seminal fluid, like squirting jam in a donut.

The hero [of a narrative] must be male, regardless of the gender of the text-image, because the obstacle, whatever its personification, is morphologically female.... The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a resistance, matrix and matter.

Teresa de Lauretis

In an examination those who do not wish to know ask questions of those who cannot tell.

Walter Raleigh (professor)

The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets.

Qurratulain Hyder

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

Carolyn Heilbrun

Christianity is not a system of philosophy, nor a ritual, nor a code of laws; it is the impartation of a divine vitality. Without the way there is no going, without the truth there is no knowing, without life there is no living.

Merrill C. Tenney

If we took the mission statements of 100 large industrial companies, mixed them up while everyone was asleep, and reassigned them at random, would anyone wake up tomorrow and cry, 'My gosh, where has our mission statement gone?'

The human being is not a fallen being in need of redemption but rather a forgetful being who must be reminded of God and his own nature.

Joseph E. B. Lumbard

Not frowning battlement nor lofty tower,
Not trenches wide nor river running by-
Shall save a city from her foeman's power,
But her sons' valor and fidelity.

Niccolò Forteguerri

To some extent, of course, we are all impostors. We play roles on the stage of life, presenting a public self that differs from the private self we share with intimates and morphing both selves as circumstances demand. Displaying a facade is part and parcel of the human condition. Indeed, one reason the feeling of being an impostor is so widespread is that society places enormous pressure on people to stifle their real selves.

Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries

Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies. It creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation.

Stephanie Pace Marshall

Losing faith in your own singularity is the start of wisdom, I suppose; also the first announcement of death.

Peter Conrad (academic)

In undertaking the conquest of self it is of the utmost importance to form strong bonds of habit between ideas and conduct.

If the study of Pearl Harbor has anything to offer for the future, it is this," Mrs. Wohlstetter wrote in her book: "We have to accept the fact of uncertainty and live with it. No magic, in code or otherwise, will provide certainty.

Roberta Wohlstetter

Public administration is the use of managerial, political, and legal theories and processes to fulfill legislative, executive, and judicial governmental mandates for the provision of regulatory and service functions for the society as a whole or for some segments of it.

David H. Rosenbloom

Civic engagement means working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.

As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith